Notch on 0x10c cancellation: “Failure is okay.”

There was always going to be a lot of pressure on the follow up to Minecraft. That game, 0x10c, has now been cancelled, and Markus ‘Notch’ Persson has written a new blog post about the decision.

“It was quite ambitious,” he says, “but I was fairly sure I could pull [0x10c] off. And besides, if I failed, so what? A lot of prototypes fail before they get anywhere at all.”

Yet it was harder for him to do so as there was so much attention on the follow up to mega-hit Minecraft. “People got incredibly excited, and the pressure of suddenly having people care if the game got made or not started zapping the fun out of the project,” he said.

As for Notch, he wants to get back to what he loves: making games. “I just want to experiment and develop and think and tinker and tweak. I want to do smaller games that can fail. So that’s what I’m going to do.”